In his Introduction to Don Quixote Heine had expressed reservations about editions of the classics; the best illustrator, he had said, was one who did not pre-empt the reader's imaginative filling-out of the writer's suggestions, one who ‘only lightly touched his subject’. When a French publisher asked him, however, to provide an accompanying text for some English engravings depicting Shakespeare's female characters, he readily agreed to do so. Here he could pay tribute to a dramatist who had long been among the few writers he could admire and respect without qualification; he could earn a good fee in a comparatively short time – life in Paris, as Heine lived it, was expensive; and he could feel that he prevented the publisher from commissioning yet another piece on Shakespeare from Ludwig Tieck. As for ‘lightly touching the subject’, he could do exactly that in his commentaries on engraved depictions of Shakespeare's heroines, which often failed to correspond to his own idea of them. He read through as many of Shakespeare's writings as the weakness of his eyes allowed, much of the time using German translations by A. W. Schlegel and others; asked a friend to lend him Schlegel's lectures on the drama, with their justly famous sections on Shakespeare and his time; refreshed his memory of Tieck's disquisitions, collected in a volume called Dramaturgical Notes (Dramaturgische Blätter), and of Franz Horn's pedestrian Shakespeare-commentary; read Hazlitt; and read Anna Jameson, too, who confirmed his belief that one could talk about Shakespeare's characters as though they existed in the real world.